How the Iran-Hormuz Crisis Reaches the World’s Women Farmers
By Ada Egbufor
Hadiza has never heard of the Strait of Hormuz.
She has never studied Iran. She does not follow speeches from Washington, Tehran, Brussels, or Abuja. She knows the price of fertilizer. She knows the weight of a baby tied to her back. She knows the sound her daughter makes when asthma tightens her chest.
And this week, in Maigari village in Kano State, Nigeria, a war far away reached her farm.
Hadiza is thirty-one years old. She is the mother of Hamza, six; Amina, three; and Jubril, seven months. She grows cowpeas, the beans that help keep poor families fed when meat is out of reach. In her house, beans are not a side dish. They are protein. They are supper. They are survival.
Before dawn, when the cock crows and the village is still gathering itself from sleep, Hadiza rises. She wakes Hamza for school, ties little Jubril to her back with a piece of ankara cloth, and calls for Amina, who insists on carrying her small hoe over one shoulder like a serious farmer.
Her husband, Inua, walks Hamza to the village school before going to the market, where he sells dry fish. Hadiza heads there too, not to sell, but to buy fertilizer for her cowpea farm.
That morning, her regular supplier tells her the price of NPK fertilizer has jumped again.
“Wetin happened, Oga Emeka?” she asks.
Emeka only shrugs. A few weeks ago, he tells her, a 60-kilogram bag cost between ₦20,000 and ₦30,000. This week, it is ₦60,000.
Another seller, standing nearby, gives the kind of answer that travels quickly through markets when official explanations arrive late.
“They say na war for Iran cause am.”
Hadiza does not know what to do with that sentence. Iran is not her village. Hormuz is not her road. No bomb has fallen on her field. No soldier has marched through Maigari.
Yet her mind begins to calculate what mothers calculate first: food, medicine, school.
If fertilizer stays this high, her harvest will shrink. If her harvest shrinks, the beans on her family’s table will shrink with it. Amina’s asthma medicine may have to wait. Hamza’s school needs may have to wait.
Hunger never announces itself as geopolitics. It arrives as a smaller pot on the fire.
Hadiza grows legumes, and legumes are supposed to be the crop of resilience. Cowpeas can feed the soil. They can feed a household. They are called, in many places, the meat of the poor.
But even resilience has a price.
The bag Hadiza cannot afford is called NPK fertilizer because it carries three essential nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. The letters look simple on the sack. But behind them is a long chain of gas fields, mines, refineries, ships, ports, insurance contracts, traders, and transporters.
The “N” is nitrogen. Much of modern nitrogen fertilizer depends on natural gas. That makes nitrogen vulnerable to energy shocks, especially when war touches the oil and gas corridors of the Persian Gulf.
The “P” is phosphorus. Phosphorus begins with phosphate rock, but rock alone does not feed crops. It must be processed, often with chemicals linked to the wider oil, gas, and sulfur supply chain. When sulfur, fuel, or freight is disrupted, phosphorus does not move cheaply.
The “K” is potassium, often called potash in fertilizer markets. Potash is mined in certain parts of the world and shipped across long distances. Like nitrogen and phosphorus, it reaches farmers through a global chain of extraction, processing, transport, and credit.
None of these letters travels alone.
So when the Strait of Hormuz trembles, the shock does not remain in oil markets. It moves through fertilizer plants, shipping insurers, port operators, distributors, market sellers, and finally into the hands of farmers like Hadiza. Recent reporting has warned that the Iran conflict is already putting pressure on fertilizer markets and that developing countries are especially exposed to fertilizer shortages and price shocks. (Reuters)
This is how a distant war enters a village field: not as fire, but as cost.
Hadiza may buy only a small quantity of fertilizer, but she is not competing only with other women in her village. She is competing with larger farms, regional distributors, commercial buyers, and aggregators who can purchase in bulk and absorb price shocks before she can. When supply tightens, the powerful buy first. The poor wait.
And when the poor wait, the soil waits too.
The aggregator who usually comes to Maigari to buy surplus cowpeas has his own arithmetic. Diesel is higher. Road transport is higher. Credit is tighter. If the cost of reaching a village rises too much, he may skip the smaller farmers and deal only with larger suppliers closer to the main roads.
That is when Hadiza loses twice.
First, she pays more to plant.
Then, if she manages to harvest, she may struggle to sell.
In official language, this is called a supply-chain disruption. In a village kitchen, it is called no money for medicine, no extra beans for the children, no room for a bad season.
The cruelty is not only that war raises prices. The deeper cruelty is that the people who absorb the shock are often the people least responsible for the decisions that caused it.
And many of them are women.
Women like Hadiza are not at the margins of food systems. They are the food system’s hidden architecture. They plant, weed, harvest, process, store, trade, cook, stretch, and sacrifice. They are farmers, mothers, traders, market women, unpaid laborers, household economists, and quiet emergency managers.
Yet their labor is still too often treated as background noise.
The United States Department of Agriculture has noted that women are responsible for roughly half of the world’s food production and, in many countries, produce between 60 and 80 percent of the food. The United Nations’ designation of 2026 as the International Year of the Woman Farmer is meant to highlight women’s essential role in food security and the social and economic barriers they still face. (USDA)
The Food and Agriculture Organization describes the International Year of the Woman Farmer as a call to recognize women’s role in agrifood systems and address persistent barriers such as land tenure, finance, technical support, education, and access to services. (FAOHome)
That is the bitter irony of this moment.
In the very year the world says it wants to honor the woman farmer, war and food politics may make her labor harder, her margins thinner, and her table poorer.
Hadiza does not need a slogan. She needs fertilizer she can afford. She needs a buyer who will still come to her village. She needs transport that does not swallow her profit. She needs a food system that recognizes that the woman closest to the soil is often farthest from the power.
The invisible frontline is not only in the Strait of Hormuz.
It is also in the hands of women like Hadiza, counting coins in a market stall, calculating whether this season will feed her children or fail them.
Author’s Note
Hadiza is a representative persona created to reflect the lived realities of many women smallholder farmers. Maigari and Kano are real; legumes are grown there; and the fertilizer-price pressures described in this essay are grounded in research. Her name stands for many women whose burdens rarely make the headlines.
Sources
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. “International Year of the Woman Farmer 2026.” FAO.
United States Department of Agriculture. “U.S. Paves Way for UN to Declare 2026 International Year of the Woman Farmer.” USDA, May 2, 2024.
United States Department of Agriculture. “Gearing Up to Celebrate the International Year of Woman Farmer.” USDA Blog.
Reuters. “Iran war fertiliser squeeze could spell trouble for next year’s grain harvests.” Reuters.
Reuters. “Iran war’s impact on fertilizer and fuel.” Reuters.
“How US-Iran War Affects Fertiliser Prices” – Daily Trust